Album review: 'The Recession,' by Young Jeezy

Thursday

Aug 28, 2008 at 12:01 AMAug 28, 2008 at 1:28 PM

Outkast and the Goodie MOb got me into Southern rap music in the mid-‘90s. I’ll even admit that there are a few guilty pleasures on Master P’s gloriously-awful "Ghetto Dope." But I just can’t get into the whole Southern-bounce thing, and its biggest star, Young Jeezy, embodies everything that makes the genre forgettable and indistinct on "The Recession."

Patrick Varine

Outkast and the Goodie MOb got me into Southern rap music back in the mid-‘90s. I’ll even admit that there are a few guilty pleasures on Master P’s gloriously-awful "Ghetto Dope."

But I just can’t get into the whole Southern-bounce thing, and its biggest star, Young Jeezy, embodies everything that makes the genre forgettable and indistinct on "The Recession."

At least a dozen of the album’s track use the exact same drum pattern. I get into plenty arguments with people who say that all rap music sounds alike, but I couldn’t argue in Jeezy’s case: Two out of every three tracks are all gothic synth lines, skittery hi-hats, 808 bass hits and rat-a-tat snares.

David Banner fell into this trap on his recent "Greatest Story Ever Told," but at least he had a few political raps and interesting messages to get across. Jeezy simply engages the crack-rap genre at its most generic level. Say what you will about the amorality of groups like the Clipse that extol the upside of the drug game; at least they’re creative about it. Most of "Recession" features similarly-structured hooks (“Blah blah blah, I do THIS, blah blah blah, I do THAT”) by way of Jeezy’s ashy mid-range tenor, which kind of sounds like a 15-year-old who just smoked a whole humidor full of cheap cigars.

Contrary to its title, the album rarely varies from how hard Jeezy is grindin’, and the album’s sole political commentary – aside from “My President,” the second of what I’m sure will be a whole slew of Barack-Obama-related songs in the run-up to the election – is about how the self-professed Snowman’s rims “keep spinnin’ in this crazy world.”

The sole bright spots in this solar eclipse of boredom come near "Recession’s" middle, with a couple songs that finally up the tempo a little: “Word Play” and “Circulate,” which works a bouncy horn-and-string loop.

Then again, J. Dilla already used the same loop to better effect on Steve Spacek’s excellent "Space Shift." And another half-decent moment, “Hustlaz Ambition,” is really just an incompetent hijacking of 2Pac’s “Ambitionz Az a Ridah,” right down to the chorus and drum pattern.

Man, I am really drinking the Haterade when it comes to this album. What can I say, though? For the guy who’s supposedly leading the way when it comes to the Southern rap scene, "The Recession" is more like The Great Depression.